I finally figured out how to do godrays. So get ready for lots of pictures with godrays in them. This is my first time trying to make a 3D image like this of nature and I'm pretty excited to do more. I've had a loose understanding of how to do a lot of this stuff, but I finally took the time to bring everything together and make an image.
I still can't really get over what's possible these days on the computer. I mean it's been possible to make something like this, but just a few years ago it would have taken a REALLY long time to setup and render. With GPU renderers something like this only took about 20 minutes to render in HD. There's still a bit of grain, but 10 years ago this would have been unthinkable on my PC.
Anyway a bit of process
First I made a simple terrain which is just some lumpy hills, then I make this grass patch and create a material that makes it react to light correctly. There needs to be some transmission(light going through the grass) as well as reflection.
Same process with the trees. All the vegetation is created with a plugin for Cinema 4D called Forester. It's a procedural plant maker. Basically you tweak parameters to get the look you want.
Then I use a scattering function in the renderer I use Octane to scatter those models on the original terrain.
Each instance actually just shows up as a little line so viewport performance doesn't suffer too much.
Really fun stuff. Definitely going to be playing around more with the natural stuff and for sure GODRAYS!!!
Thanks for looking peeps!
Okay, really this is amazing, what a good post!
Thanks @miguel23zs! :)
Yay for godrays! They were actually pretty easy to do in...one of the landscape 3d packages I tried about a billion years ago (possibly Bryce but I tihnk it was Vue, though I couldn't come to terms with Vue's ToS so I never used them after playing around with the free version or trial or whatever it was back then). I do remember it not being too much of an effort to render even on the crappy box I had back at the time XD Haven't tried them since.
Your godrays look pretty good, the bottom part of it is especially convincing, I'm less certain about the top part not because I don't think it looks good (it does), just that I don't usually look at it as it stabs my eyeballs so hard to compare with the real thing XD I have no problem whatsoever with more godrays in the future :)
Haha, yea it's generally inadvisable to look directly into the sun IRL, so let's keep it digital :p I never got into those software. I had a friend that was really into Vue, but I never liked the results. Since then I've seen some stunning stuff from Vue, but still haven't tried it myself.
I'm mostly referring to general 3D software like Maya. Before I was using Maya with either Mental Ray or Renderman, and yea, like I said of course it's been possible, but back then it took hours to render a sphere in HD with a fog volume.
The rays are beautiful and magical.
Finally!! I thought you'd never figure out how to make God rays!! Those are the best kind of rays!! Nice work!! LOL.